Contemporary Jazz is an attitude, played by epigones and mostly, to someone who is intimately familiar with the "old stuff", its just plain stale and boring. Technical excellence is usually high, but an essential part is missing, probably disolved by political correctness, masss culture and the creative brains (usually black), going different ways these days. With Monk the anger was REAL and it gave his music a presence and a rawness which you could feel. The loneliness of Coltrane could be heard not only in his lonely woman theme, Miles'aloofness, his despair was in his music, Ellington, a musical genius, was driven by a social message, who swings like Basie these days or is funny like Carla Bley? Where is the velvet of Hodges, the clear smoothness of Bechet? Where is that deeply engrained musicality of Satchmo's...even his farts were music....etc.etc. No, Jazz was never really smooth, except when it became commercially bastardised. Was Parker smooth?
But these times are gone, what we have now is the attitude, but neither the pain, nor the cojones. Just MO.
But these times are gone, what we have now is the attitude, but neither the pain, nor the cojones. Just MO.